As a business owner, acquiring a substantial email list of potential prospects can be incredibly exciting. However, before crafting that perfect email pitch and hitting the send button, it’s essential to take a moment and consider the implications and best practices to ensure your account won’t get blocked. The most recent spam regulations by major providers like Yahoo and Google have heightened the importance of strategic email practices. We will help you to navigate the landscape while adhering to the latest spam requirements.
The new requirements, which came into effect in February 2024, state that Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other mailbox providers will impose new protection standards for bulk email senders—specifically those sending out more than 5000 messages a day.
Failure to adhere to these regulations can result in your emails being sent to the junk folder or rejected altogether, underscoring the importance of compliance. For instance, one of our new clients sent approximately 6000 emails to a new audience before seeking our assistance. This action led to a 25% decrease in their weekly newsletter’s open rate.
While cold email blast is not the most effective marketing tactic, below are some best practices that can help your campaign to be more successful in terms of email deliverability and engagement and prevent your inbox from getting blocked or being marked as spam.
- Hyper-personalize and segment your list.
- The email needs to be highly relevant to your audience and provide them value. One tactic is to create customer and audience profiles and think of their pain points and what you offer them.
- Segment your email lists based on demographics, interests, or past interactions, industry, role, etc., to deliver personalized and relevant content.
- Always think of putting yourself in the situation of your audience and ask the question: “What’s in it for me?”
- Use a new domain but ensure it’s warmed up. Don’t know how to do that? Contact us, and we will help you.
- Clean up your lists:
- Ensure you first run your list through email verification services to eliminate all invalid or inactive email addresses. This is extremely important because when you send cold emails to invalid or inactive email addresses, it can increase your email bounce rate, which can then hamper your sender’s reputation and have a negative impact on your email deliverability.
- Copy:
- Craft compelling subject lines and email content that resonates with your audience’s interests and needs.
- Avoid overly promotional language, spam-triggering language such as “Sale” “Free.”
- Personalize your email copy and subject line by addressing your contacts by their first name, industry, and value you bring to them.
- Avoid using all caps in your subject line and email copy.
- Always focus on providing value and “what’s in it for me” value proposition.
- Limit the number of links in your email and focus on one message you want to get across: one idea and a single call-to-action (CTA).
- Experiment with different email formats, designs, and calls-to-action through A/B testing to optimize your campaigns’ performance.
- Sending, monitoring and optimizing:
- Keep your sending volume low, ideally under 50 emails per day to achieve maximum deliverability.
- If you wish to send more emails per day, use multiple email accounts.
- Monitor your email performance with open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates to gauge campaign effectiveness. An ideal bounce rate is under 2% to avoid issues with deliverability.
- Provide a valid email address as a reply-to.
- Regular List Maintenance:
- Routinely clean and update your email list to remove inactive or invalid email addresses, ensuring improved deliverability rates.
While buying and sending emails to coded lists presents challenges, it is not illegal as long as you adhere to applicable laws and regulations such as CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, and others that govern email communication. For personalized guidance on navigating these complexities, reach out to our team of experts.
